Another Kind of Poetry

Abstract

FOR US RAISED IN the tradition of English poetry, especially that of the Romantics and Victorians, poetry is words moving across and down the page in precise line formation, all in well measured feet, falling to recurrent echoing sounds. Such poetry, composed in the head, after much magic inspiration, is set down by hand on paper, and directed at the eye that reads it. Perhaps, more than ever before, it has become a phenomenon determined by punctuation and stress, so that a passage that was prose before, by careful typographical re-arrangement and manipulation of stops and points of stress, emerges a glorious poem. A recent famous case that immediately comes to mind is that of the veteran Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid creating his poem Perfect by uncannily chopping up a prose passage from the collection of short stories The Blue Bed by the comparatively unknown Glyn Jones. In case you think I am teasing, let me quote the piece that for over twenty years has been praised by professors and critics as the perfect Imagist poem Ezra Pound and others did not write but which in fact is a prose passage taken word for word from a short story: